Scorcher

John Quiggin36 Comments

I reviewed Clive Hamilton’s Scorcher: The Dirty Politics of Climate Change in the Fin on Friday. It’s over the fold.

I was amused to read, the next day, the Oz praising emissions trading as The free market way to save the world, and noting “the rapid change that has taken place in community and business attitudes over a relatively short period of time as the science of climate change has become more widely known and better understood.” Of course, it would have been more widely known and better understood if it weren’t for the continuous attacks on the science that the Oz was making right up to the last possible moment.

Meanwhile, I notice lots of others making an inelegant retreat from Lavoisier-style scientific delusionism to the long-prepared Lomborg line that it will all cost too much. But, thanks to the Stern Review, the recent statement by Australian economist the forthcoming IPCC report and even the PM’s Task Group, that line has already been outflanked. We’re down to arguing about details and numbers now, an argument where rightwing bloviators have little to contribute. Howard has belatedly realised the fact, accepting both emissions trading and quantitative targets (but not until 2008!).
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What I’m reading

John Quiggin2 Comments

Vanity Fair by Thackeray. Becky Sharp is a wonderful creation, even better than I remembered her. Thackeray’s only problem is to keep her plans from succeeding so well as to establish her in the boringly safe wealthy position she aspires to. Rather than stress out over verisimilitude in this respect, he just keeps reminding us that if Becky’s plans (to snare a rich husband, or to placate her poor husband’s wealthy relatives) had come off, we wouldn’t have anything more to read.

If I were you, I wouldn’t start from here (or now)

John Quiggin53 Comments

I’ve had a quick look at the report of the PM’s Task Group on Emissions Trading. It gives a pretty good summary of the main issues, constrained by the political requirement that it should not even look at the obvious implication of an argument for participation in an international emissions trading scheme, namely that we should ratify Kyoto forthwith. The choice of 2012 (when Kyoto expires) as the target date neatly avoids the issue, as well as meeting the political imperative of not endorsing what Labor has proposed.

The main implication of the Report is that we should have got started on all this ten years ago (or at least, back in 2003 when Howard killed the idea), and that we’ll now have a more costly adjustment path than if we had acted sooner.

Something of a surprise is that the McKibbin-Wilcoxen hybrid idea didn’t get more than a couple of brief mentions. Some of the leaks I saw suggested that the Task Group might go this way, as did Howard’s rhetoric about an “Australian, practicaL” scheme. As I mentioned a while back, the big problem with this idea is its incompatibility international trading, and this is presumably why the Task Group didn’t go this way.

Heterodoxy is not my doxy

John Quiggin13 Comments

Following up on a couple of recent posts on Crooked Timber, I thought it might be useful for me to explain why I don’t think of myself as a ‘heterodox’ economist or even find the concept particularly useful. Although I’m clearly to the left of most people in the economics profession (including a fair number who would call themselves heterodox) I’m happy to identify myself with the mainstream research program in economics.
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Weekend reflections

John Quiggin11 Comments

Weekend Reflections is on again. Please comment on any topic of interest (civilised discussion and no coarse language, please). Feel free to put in contributions more lengthy than for the Monday Message Board or standard comments.

DDT, tobacco and the parallel universe

John Quiggin21 Comments

The piles of documents released as a result of litigation against Phillip Morris and Exxon are gifts that keep on giving for those of us interested in the process by which the Republican parallel universe has been constructed. Previous research has shown that the core proponents of global warming delusionism including Stephen Milloy, Fred Singer and Fred Seitz got their start as shills for PM, denying the risks of passive smoking. A string of rightwing thinktanks including Cato, the Alexis de Tocqueville Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute helped to promote these hacks and the lies they were paid to peddle.

Now it’s turned out that one of the hardiest of parallel universe beliefs, the claim that Rachel Carson and the US ban on DDT were responsible for millions of deaths in the third world, arises from the same source.

One of the great puzzles of the DDT myth has been that it appeared to arise from pure ideological animus against Carson and the environmental movement – DDT is not patented so there were no profits to be obtained from pushing it. It turns out that the DDT campaign was pitched to the tobacco industry as a diversionary attack on the World Health Organization which was playing a leading role in campaigns against smoking. The leading figure in the exercise was Roger Bate of the American Enterprise Institute and its front organization, Africa Fighting Malaria.

So, far from helping to save lives, the bloggers and commentators who’ve pushed the myth of the DDT ban have been the (presumably unwitting) dupes of an industry even deadlier than malaria (CDC estimates that tobacco kills 5 million people a year compared to 1 to 3 million for malaria.

Update WHO hits back on passive smoking. Having neutralised the DDT issue with a greatly overstated change of policy not long ago, it looks as if they are back on the attack
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Gittins on the Water Plan

John Quiggin6 Comments

Ross Gittins says of the government’s $10 billion National Plan for Water Security “They don’t want to fix problems, just be seen trying“. As has become abundantly clear from Channel 7’s FOI exercise, the whole thing was cooked up in a week or so, with the aim of countering a co-operative initiative launched by Kevin Rudd. Once it was out, the problem was that the only policy that would have any real effect, buying back water rights, was vetoed by the Nationals. So, in the Budget, the whole Plan was kicked into touch until 2008-09, by which time the election would be safely out of the way.

I had an initial assessment here, when there still seemed to be some chance the Plan would work, and an evaluation more similar to Gittins not long ago.

I have been very disappointed in Turnbull’s performance on this issue. He obviously knows what needs to be done, and if anyone had the capacity to ride roughshod over the Nats, I would have thought he did. I can only conclude that, having been put into the job by Howard, he has had no backing and has been, in effect, set up to fail.

(Thanks to Tim Coelli for pointing me to this piece).

Opportunity cost

John Quiggin6 Comments

With yet another publicly-funded round of Liberal Party advertising looming, this time on climate change, I’ve been thinking about how other parties ought to respond to this. One way is to point out what the money could have bought instead. With 150 electorates, each $1.5 million spent on advertising is $10 000 per electorate. So, the $60 million or so spent advertising WorkChoices (or whatever it’s going to be called now) amounts to about $400 000 per electorate, enough to employ 8-10 primary school teachers or police officers. I’m sure there are plenty of particular local projects that could be pointed out as foregone opportunities. For example, the money to be spent justifying the government’s inaction on climate change could have paid for thousands of tree plantings in every electorate.

Climate change roundup

John Quiggin11 Comments

There’s so much happening on climate change that it’s hard to keep up, but I’ll try and note some points down, as much for the record as anything else. I’ll update this roundup with more as I get time.

* There was talk in the Oz last week of a Sydney declaration of a regional emissions trading agreement, to emerge (very conveniently timed) from the APEC meeting in September. Now the idea is dead, reflecting the same Bush Administration intransigence on display in the leadup to the G8 meetings. Howard is discovering, like Tony Blair, that loyalty to Bush is its own reward.

* Also in the Oz, Alan Oxley doesn’t know the difference between levels and growth rates.

* And, yet again in the Oz, a classic example of the fallacy of composition (unless its a particularly egregious case of special pleading). To be fair, the author finally gets around to the point that we have to do something even if our role is a relatively small one. Although it’s not strictly relevant, Australia’s share of international emissions is about the same as that of the UK or France (even though they have larger populations).